If you input a client’s legal name while making a transaction, and that client has previously been recorded under their trading name, this will result in a duplicate contact. If you’re using auto-suggest while entering the name of a contact, you may accidentally input a suggested spelling that differs slightly from the spelling you’ve already used for that contact. We’ve all done it – mistyping the name of a contact while inputting a transaction in Xero is an easy mistake to make, and a sure-fire way of creating an unwanted duplicate. Nevertheless, you may gain some useful insight by learning about some of the most common causes behind this issue. If you find that your contact list in Xero is constantly getting clogged up with duplicate contacts, don’t worry – this is a common problem faced by many Xero users. Merging contacts in Xero is easier than it sounds – click here to find out how it’s done. Duplicate contacts only add further clutter to your account and make managing your contact list more confusing, so you’ll want to merge them as soon they crop up. Keeping your Xero contacts organised also means you’ll want to sort out any accidental duplicates that have made their way into your contact list. If you’re not sure how archiving contacts works, take a look at our guide here. Thankfully, sorting out your unneeded contacts in Xero is a seamless process – the best method is to use Xero’s archiving feature, which removes these contacts from your contact list, but keeps them on record so you can restore them later if needed.

An obvious example is where a contact is no longer in use having a backlog of unused contacts creates unnecessary clutter and makes it harder to find the contacts you need to transact with. There are a number of reasons that users have for wanting to delete a contact in Xero.

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